


A Nation of Herbivores: Hospitality, Cosmopolitanism, and Nationalism in Sherlock.

by notagarroter (redbuttonhole)



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Gen, Meta
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-25
Updated: 2017-05-25
Packaged: 2018-11-04 19:47:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,308
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10997757
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/redbuttonhole/pseuds/notagarroter
Summary: What Magnussen tells us about Englishness.





	A Nation of Herbivores: Hospitality, Cosmopolitanism, and Nationalism in Sherlock.

 

  


_**Best thing about the English ... you’re so domesticated. All standing around, apologising ... keeping your little heads down. You can do what you like here. No-one’s ever going to stop you.  A nation of herbivores.** _

What are the laws of hospitality?  

We all have a general sense of what it means to be hospitable – offering a drink to your guests, for example, or inviting them to stay for dinner.  But how far does this obligation extend?  What if the guest is a stranger?  What if it's someone in need – do you let them take shelter?  Use your phone?  Wear your clothes?  

* * *

What if your guest is an enemy?

  


Let's take Irene Adler.  At the beginning of ASiB, Sherlock barely knows anything at all about Adler, and yet his ruse to gain access to her house depends on her hospitality.  He knows she is a sex worker and a blackmailer, and yet he feels confident that when he shows up in the guise of a roughed up vicar, she will let him in.  

  


And so she does.  

But what are the limits to Adler's hospitality?  Sherlock and John ask for a first aid kit, and it is provided.  They are shown to a comfortable sitting room.  They are offered tea.  Arguably, Adler even puts her body on offer by presenting herself in the nude.  

  


For most of us, this would seem above and beyond any reasonable notion of hospitality – surely the laws of hospitality don't obligate us to offer up our naked bodies to strangers and enemies.  

But then, hospitality extended out of obligation isn't in the spirit of hospitality at all.  To be truly hospitable, you have to give freely, willingly, generously, and not because some authority said so.  But if the whole point of hospitality is to give freely, out of pure kindness to your fellow, how do you know where the limits are?  Who will tell you, _"That's all right, you've done enough.  Giving any more would be absurd"_?  There is no law or authority to tell you what constitutes "reasonable" hospitality.  The very idea of "reasonable limits" is contrary to the idea of hospitality.

So is there anything Adler won't give her guests?  The obvious answer is her camera phone, and yet in a way, she offers Sherlock that too:  

  


An act of extreme generosity.  But Adler does have a limit to her hospitality – when Sherlock tries to leave with her phone, she drugs him and beats him to get it back.  

What about when Adler turns up at 221b?  Even though she has broken into his flat (twice!) and crept into his bed, Sherlock's hospitality toward her is unstinting.  He gives her the use of his shower and his best dressing gown, he offers her sanctuary from her enemies, he returns her phone to her, and he solves her puzzle, even though she's given him no reason to believe they're on the same side.  

  


Mycroft suggests Sherlock performs this service for Adler out of love or maybe vanity, but is it possible Sherlock was simply being radically polite?

Sherlock's extremity of good manners is again in evidence in TRF, when Moriarty comes for a visit.  Sherlock has every reason this time to believe Moriarty is an enemy who wishes him harm, yet he makes no serious effort to prevent him from entering his flat.  

  


Indeed, Sherlock prepares for Moriarty's arrival by making tea, which he then offers to his guest with a great deal more ceremony than the beverage usually occasions in 221b.  

  


Moriarty, for his part, makes a surprisingly good guest.  He pushes gently against Sherlock's hospitality, helping himself to the fruit on the table and claiming a chair he wasn't offered...  

  


but he can't be said to abuse it.  Even though he has promised to kill Sherlock, Sherlock appears fairly confident that Moriarty won't stoop to doing it under such circumstances.  To do so would be ungracious.

All this stands in marked contrast to the behavior of our S3 villain, Charles Augustus Magnussen.  Interestingly, Magnussen starts on a more polite note than his predecessors: he actually rings the doorbell, and when that has no effect, he waits for Mrs Hudson to let him in.  From that point on, however, he embarks on a deliberate campaign to abuse Sherlock's hospitality.  He starts by claiming the flat as his own, then derides it as unlivably filthy.  

  


Then for his piece de résistance, he pisses in the fireplace and drops his hand towel on the floor.  

  


Not for one second are we meant to believe this behavior comes from Magnussen being poorly raised, from not knowing how to behave in a stranger's house.  He makes it perfectly clear that he is deliberately trying to unsettle and provoke Sherlock.  But while John is visibly shaken, Sherlock remains the perfectly unflappable host throughout.  Even put to this severe test, we see how Sherlock has embraced the principle of radical, absolute hospitality.   He doesn't ask, he doesn't refuse, and he doesn't set limitations.  Every wish is granted, even to a known enemy.

So what happens when Magnussen is asked to return the favor?  

  


Magnussen has invited Sherlock and John to his house – indeed, has sent a helicopter to fetch them.  But not only does he fail to offer them refreshment, Magnussen deliberately draws attention to the snub.  He wants Sherlock to remark on his unwillingness to accommodate his guests in any way.  

This is in marked contrast to Magnussen attitude at the very beginning of the episode, in which the propriety of Magnussen's relationship with the Prime Minister is questioned by an MP.  Magnussen's response is to admonish the MP for his failure of hospitality to foreigners:

  


 

  


At which point the MP (Garvie) immediately backpedals his faux pas: _“That’s not what I meant. That is not in any way ...”_

Earlier in the same interrogation, Magnussen justifies his behavior in the UK by invoking the conventions of hospitality:

  


From our very first introduction to Magnussen, he is always relying on the English understanding of hospitality to support his dubious acts.  But what becomes of him in the end?  Magnussen relies on the hospitality, but refuses to extend it himself.  I'm tempted to argue that Sherlock feels justified in murdering Magnussen in his own home because of this lapse, although that's a bit of a stretch.  But more interestingly, the British Government's response to Sherlock's act is to exile him – literally rendering him a stranger in his own home.  In fact, it makes him *worse* than a stranger, because as an exile, he cannot even count on the hospitality that would be shown to an ordinary foreigner.

So what is the message in all this?  It's hard to disentangle because the text itself is ambivalent, in my reading.  On one hand, the hospitality Sherlock extends to Magnussen and his other enemies seems an advertisement for cosmopolitanism and inclusion.  It suggests that, ideally, we are all citizens of the world, and owe each other a radical kindness and generosity, even in the direst of situations.  On the other, it can hardly be a coincidence that the character who most obviously fails in this generosity and abuses it in others is a foreigner.  A further complication is that it is precisely this universal, cosmopolitan generosity which is presented as intrinsically English, and a point of pride in the national character (while being denigrated as a weakness by the foreigner).  

England defines itself both in contrast with the foreign Other, and paradoxically by its inclusion of this Other:  people are at their most English when being cosmopolitan, and when an Englishman fails to be sufficiently inclusive, he sacrifices his very Englishness.

And yet, even here, allowances are made.  England can do without foreigners, it seems, but as the British Government says:

  


([more about this reading of hospitality](http://www.iep.utm.edu/derrida/#SH7b), and credit to [ariane devere](http://arianedevere.livejournal.com/) for transcriptions.)


End file.
